Kejriwal meets Shinde, demands suspension of cops

Hours after Delhi Police refused to suspend three of their officials, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, who had made the demand, asked Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde to bring the police under the Aam Aadmi Party-led government’s control.

An AAP delegation led by Delhi CM Kejriwal met Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde on Friday evening and reiterated the demand of suspension of the police officers for alleged negligence in two crime-related complaints made by AAP ministers Somnath Bharti and Rakhi Birla.

On Thursday, Bharti and Birla, were involved in ugly spats with the police while Kejriwal backed them up by blaming the force — even calling it “compromised” — for the city’s rising crime graph.

Delhi law minister Bharti on Wednesday set out to “uncover a sex and drug racket” at a building in south Delhi’s Khirki Extension, having earlier sent a decoy customer. But when Bharti, a lawyer, asked the policemen accompanying him to raid the building, they flatly refused in the absence of a search warrant or proper police back-up.

“The ‘raid’ would have been illegal,” said a senior officer.

Birla, the women and child development minister, had her own run-in with the police in Sagarpur when they refused to apprehend the in-laws of a woman who has been hospitalized with 45% burns.

Terming the police, who answer to the Union home ministry, “highly… completely compromised", Kejriwal said the safety of people was in God's hands. Highlighting his ministers’ clashes with the police, he said, “It would be a rare chance that Delhi Police would do anything to protect the citizens when it did not listen to the government itself.”

“I am yet to seek information about these (episodes) and will be in a position to comment only when I have done so,” police chief BS Bassi told HT on Thursday. “Let me assure everyone that we are doing the best we can despite resource constraints.”

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